ISI Speakers Bureau

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Bruce S. Thornton

Professor of Classics and Humanities, California State University, Fresno; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Dr. Thornton grew up on a cattle ranch in Fresno, California. His father was a cowboy and a barber who never attended high school, his mother the child of Italian immigrants. From an early age, Thornton worked on the ranch, and from the experience he acquired a practical realism, a clear-eyed acceptance of the concrete, harsh realities sometimes overlooked or ignored in the ivory-tower academy. He received his B.A. in Latin and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and is currently professor of Classics and Humanities in the Department of Foreign Languages at California State University in Fresno. Thornton's first book is Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Westview, 1997), and his latest title is Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter, 2000).